I spoke with Lebanese writer and translator Lina Mounzer about witnessing and experiencing the Beirut explosion on August 4th, 2020. So far there are 157 deaths, 5,000 injuries, US$10–15 billion in property damage and an estimated 300,000 people left homeless.
The blast was linked to about 2,750 tonnes (3,030 short tons) of ammonium nitrate – equivalent to around 1,155 tonnes of TNT (4,830 gigajoules) – that had been confiscated by the government from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus and stored in the port without proper safety measures for six years.
Relevant List:
- Lina’s piece for the New York Times: It Sounded Like The World Itself Was Breaking Open
- My Twitter thread starting shortly after the explosion and lasting to today with hundreds of tweet updates
- A Twitter list of mine with people to follow on Lebanon
- How to help + this
Transcript prepared by Yusra Bitar and Antidote Zine:
All of us are talking about revenge. I ended my article saying that amnesty won’t be theirs for the taking, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it. I believe that they are going to get away with this, the way they got away with everything else. And that just makes me so angry.
Elia Ayoub: Hi everyone. This is a special episode. There’s no editing, no music. We’re going to talk about the blast that happened in Beirut three days ago. I wanted to talk to Lina Mounzer because I had a conversation with her three months ago and I felt that she would be the best person to talk to about this. She was in Beirut when it happened. I am not. I am in Switzerland. I really wanted to have someone who was there talk about this.
You won’t learn much from this episode, necessarily, in terms of facts and journalism. That wasn’t our top priority, because there’s already quite a lot of that out there. I will post links on the associated blog post for further reading, how to inform yourself, as well as links to help and donate.
We don’t even know how many people are dead. It’s over 140, but it is widely believed it will increase, and there is quite a lot of fatalities that may never be accounted for because, long story short, not everyone is going to go to the hospitals; not everyone has the time or opportunity or ability to get the care they need. We’ve already been dealing with the pandemic and the economic cisis that have been paralyzing the country even before the explosion.
There’s very few words I can use. I’m very bad at describing these things in the first place. To say that this feels like adding insult to injury would be accurate but inadequate. I don’t think there are any correct words. It’s a mixture of heartbreak and complete unadulterated anger at this political establishment in Lebanon.
I expect there is much more to come on the political side, in terms of people protesting. There have already been a few, especially since yesterday. But this is not what we’ll be talking about. We’re just talking about Lina experiencing this, her living through it. That’s really it.
If you are listening to this from Beirut, know that I am thinking about you. I have no choice; my entire family is there. I won’t say things like We’ll get through this or Tomorrow’s a better day. I can’t make any of these promises. We don’t know if this political establishment will be held accountable. It is up to us, in the end, and I know that we are fucking exhausted.
Lina, you can start by introducing yourself and we’ll take it from there.
Lina Mounzer: My name is Lina Mounzer, and I am a writer and translator.
EA: I think everyone already knows what we’re going to talk about now, so let me start with a very subjective question. How are you?
LM: I’m not good. I don’t think I’m coping very well, but I don’t know anybody who’s coping very well. The first day I was in complete shock. The second day I woke up crying. Yesterday I was kind of numb, partly because I went to Gemmayazeh and Mar Mikhael and parts of Achrafieh. I was just really numb all day yesterday. Yesterday was the first day that I properly ventured out of the house. I walked the dog in my neighborhood and there was just so much glass underfoot. The sound of cleaning glass has been the background sound ever since it happened. There was just so much glass. It was a very bad idea to walk the dog. She just needs to be pee and poo and go home now. It’s very precarious. There’s glass that’s half out of the windows, and you have to cross the street back and forth.
The destruction over near the port area is just unbelievable. I thought my neighborhood was hard hit—but just relatively. My brain is very slowly absorbing information and I’m starting to realize how incredibly massive it is. We live in Batrakieh and we have a clear line of sight to the port; there’s nothing between our building and the port. And I just saw somebody did a resonance imaging of the blast that shows you the shock wave; it’s a blast analysis of the explosion, and the blast was asymmetrical, apparently. It went much more towards the east and south because the grain silo which exploded was more or less shielded towards us. The building in front of ours is totally devastated. Again, it’s not like Gemmayzeh or Mar Mikhael. But everything is blown out and there’s balcony railings twisted out of shape.
I guess with shock waves, you don’t know how they’re going to be absorbed. In the building across from us, there are certain floors where the ceiling came down, and other floors where nothing broke. I’m thinking about it in these terms: the way shock waves hit, it’s almost like with people. You don’t know how it’s going to affect—some things might look unscathed and then the rest are shattered.
Anyway, no, I’m not good at all. Every day is a new feeling. I haven’t really been able to sleep, and I’m not a person who has trouble sleeping; that’s not how my stress translates itself in my body usually. Every night, I just can’t tear myself away. Last night I went to bed at 1:30, like, Okay, it’s relatively early, I’m going to sleep. And I woke up at five, gasping. My heart was pounding so hard. And I was like, Okay, I just need to sleep again, close my eyes. And I closed my eyes, and I had the most horrific images. Later when I thought about it, it was like those stupid American movies with Vietnam vets: when they want to try and show you trauma, they show you these cut scenes of horrible things. I always thought that was so stupid.
And no, it’s not like this is my first rodeo. But obviously nothing of this scale has ever happened to us. And everybody who’s a certain age here has lived through more than one war and more than one explosion. I can’t, I just can’t. It’s the sound of it that just keeps coming back to me. I don’t know how to describe it, and I feel like I’ll never have the words to describe it, and as a result it’s just going to stay trapped in my body forever, and I don’t know what to do about that.
EA: I heard the sound via video. I’m not in Lebanon, so I wouldn’t be able to describe it either.
You were talking about heart-pounding. My memory works with numbers, I don’t know why—it’s very visual and very numeric—and I know that the blast happened at exactly 6:08:18. People posted on Twitter who have those Fitbits, the things that monitor heart rate or whatever, and there was a spike at exactly 6:08. It’s very easy to remember after that.
Just now before talking to you, I had a bit of time and I started reading some news outlets—which I didn’t do in the past few days. I’ve been talking to friends and family and taking it all in. I had a Skype call with friends yesterday night; they were there in Beirut and they were not able to sleep either, nor the night before, the night of the explosion. It’s very difficult to say much. I haven’t written anything. I know that you’ve written a piece for the New York Times. The last time we spoke, I told you I was unable to write and now it’s completely worse.
There is a surreal element to it. I have the Wikipedia page in front of me, and I’m going to read the summary at the beginning for those who may not know what we’re talking about.
“On the evening of 4 August 2020, a series of explosions occurred in the city of Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. The extremely powerful blast at the port of Beirut, which was preceded by a fire, left at least 157 people dead, at least eighty more missing and more than five thousand injured. Beirut governor Marwan Abboud estimated that up to 300,000 people were left homeless by the explosion. The government declared a two-week state of emergency. The explosion was linked to about 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, equivalent to around 1,155 tons of TNT, that had been confiscated by the government from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus.”
The Rhosus was some shady Moldovan-flagged cargo ship owned by a Russian businessman who was apparently arrested in Cyprus like twenty minutes before we started talking—I just saw this now. So I continue reading: property damage of ten, fifteen billion dollars; displaced up to 300,000. There is a “type” to this kind of disaster, it’s called an ammonium nitrate disaster. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it.
It’s so surreal. For the past few days, it’s all been just pure emotions. I’m cognitive dissonancing as fuck from here in Geneva. When it happened, I was waiting for a mattress delivery, because we’re moving to a new place in Geneva, and my friend just texts me saying to open the news, so I opened Twitter and there’s a blast in Beirut. There’s a blast in Beirut. As you said, this would not be the first one, if it was just a “blast in Beirut.” And in my mind is like, Okay, well, this is obviously bad, let’s find out what happened. I thought maybe it’s political. There is the tribunal thing coming out; there’s a thing between Israel and Hezbollah in Syria and in the South. I thought it was maybe something like that. Then I saw the videos and I was like, Fuck, this is beyond.
I wasn’t even considering this as a worst-case scenario; it wasn’t even in my top ten (I do have a top ten list of worst-case scenarios). My sister’s in-laws were completely blown away; their flat in Achrafieh was completely destroyed. One of them is still at the hospital; the father had stitches, the grandmother they put at the hospital just as a precaution, and the mother is still at the hospital. Everyone I know in Beirut has something, to different extents of severity. Some had to be hospitalized, some had quick stitches.
Other than that, I’ve been mostly compartmentalizing for the past seventy-two hours. Obviously easier to do since I’m not in Lebanon. My main thing is cognitive dissonance—until I spoke with many friends who are saying that even they are experiencing cognitive dissonance while being there. That’s difficult to explain. This summary on Wikipedia means nothing to me. I don’t know. I’m obviously invested in knowing how many people died and were injured, but that’s about it. What the Beirut governor said, I don’t care. What other governments have said, and the reactions of the international community—none of this shit matters. It’s all been completely surreal.
Sorry. I’ve obviously been having difficulty reacting to it. What really hit yesterday was the the photo of the fire brigade, the fire fighters of Beirut, all dead. There’s that photo of them going to the thing. The second thing that really hit is my mother’s stained glass. My mom has a stained glass workshop; a lot of the destroyed windows are my mom’s doing, which is very weird to see—the stained glasses in churches and the Sursock museum. So yeah, I don’t know what to say, to be honest.
We know that this is going to get worse in terms of injuries and fatalities. I don’t think anyone is in denial about this (that’s with COVID-19 taken into account as well). The immediate relief probably helps. I’m not saying it makes no difference, of course we need immediate relief and aid. I just wonder how long it’s going to keep coming in and how long the media attention is going to stay on this, because usually the attention span is pretty short. So yeah, that’s been my past seventy-two hours or so.
You mentioned that you tried to go down. I have some friends who live in Baabda, or elsewhere surrounding Beirut, who are going down to Beirut to help with the clean-up. Obviously, that’s a good thing. But I’m also hearing about people who go there but then don’t stay long, or they go there but they’re exhausted within half an hour. There was one account on Twitter of someone who went there to try and clean and he cleaned for half an hour and then he was exhausted, and ended up transfixed for four hours, looking at the destroyed port. I can only guess that is quite a surreal thing to see.
To the best of your ability, how can you describe your past seventy-two hours? You did manage to write an article, which is very good and very important.
LM: My last seventy-two hours, let’s see. I don’t have a coherent narrative for them, frankly. Every day is a new feeling. Obviously, right after it happened, you’re frantically trying to reach everybody to make sure they’re okay. Just like after every fucking explosion that we’ve had here. I really didn’t know how big it was. I had no fucking idea.
Yesterday a friend and I were updating each other, we hadn’t spoken until right after. She lives in the building right in front of me that I was saying had been utterly destroyed. The photos of her apartment—luckily, she and her young son were not in the house. I mean, otherwise I don’t know. Anyway, I saw that we had exchanged text messages and voice messages, and I had no memory of it. And I listened to myself talking to her, I guess about twelve minutes after the blast, and it’s unrecognizable to me. To hear my voice that way, kind of hysterical, out of breath, and then tapering off because it’s just out of words…
The next day I was very sad. It was the first day that I was able to cry, but I was basically crying off and on all day. Then yesterday—I don’t know, I really don’t know. My memory is not working. Oh, of course, I was writing my article the whole fucking day, and looking at the news. I usually have the internet off and my phone off when I’m writing, but this was obviously impossible, so it took me forever to finish. And my editor, who is very generous, was actually in India on a reporting trip, so he was even further on in time than me, but we just stayed up going back and forth on edits. I was up very late and woke up very early. I had also just written an article about the economic crisis that should be out in the next few days, and I still had to go through edits for that.
To tell you the truth, the work has been very cathartic. It gives me something to focus on. This is my coping mechanism, intellectualizing things and distilling them into the very solid container of words. Because otherwise I’m just a fucking spinning-out-of-control mess. Every kind word, every nice reachout, everything—it just fucking kills me. I’m just so tired. I’m very tired and I’m very angry. I’m so angry that I don’t even—I’m feeling all of these things physically, and it’s like my body is going to fly apart. I’m just fucking enraged. I’m fucking enraged. I cannot believe it. What we’ve been made to endure from all the people at the top, these motherfuckers and their cronies, and the people who lick their boots, and their security details who are all former militiamen who now get to keep their rifles and be bodyguards and beat the shit out of people if somebody insults their leader.
I’m just so, so angry. It’s this conglomeration of people that have had us in a chokehold. Everybody is in everybody else’s pocket, essentially. Like, the Achour guy who built the fucking Eden Bay? Him and Berri are super tight together, and if you insult him you insult Berri and vice-versa. What do you call these rotten, corrupt relationships? Anyway, it’s what we’ve been made to endure at their hands. Forget the civil war. Forget it! Forget the last thirty years since then. Forget the neoliberal project of crushing every possible social and public program in the city, every infrastructural thing that could have made people’s lives easier. Forget that we still don’t have fucking electricity since the civil war. Forget the sewers overflowing, forget the garbage crisis, and the pollution. Just in the last six or seven months, they stole all of our money. They made us destitute. They stopped allowing us to withdraw dollars, while they smuggled six billion dollars out of the country. They’re squabbling while the IMF—the fucking IMF—is now trying to put transparency and “humanitarian measures” in place.
They still do not want any kind of haircut. And after all this, they fucking blow us up! They blow up our city, out of neglect and greed. The stories that are coming in! Every single person is responsible—they all knew about this. To me, this is just beyond appalling. There’s no words for it. And after all this, fucking Saad Hariri goes down to the port to have a photo opportunity among the ruins, and then goes to visit his dad. What, to tell him, Daddy, they killed Beirut again as if he’s not personally responsible for most of it?
So there are protesters there. There are people who have set up charity tents to give out aid (these are all over the city, by the way, tables where people are giving out water and bread—it’s another kindness that I’m very moved by). Anyway, people are angry, so they kick at his car, and the bodyguards come out and they beat the shit out of people, and then his thugs come on their motorcycles—the Mustaqbal [Future] supporters. Because Oh my God, how can you insult great master who throws scraps our way? And they broke apart all the tents and upended all the tables, and ground the fucking bread into the stones and dirt underfoot.
The level of impunity is—I really don’t have words for it. Right now, I feel my chest is hurting, I can’t breathe properly, even just talking about it. I don’t know what to do with all of this anger. And I see this with everyone. I don’t know, all of us are talking about revenge. I ended my article saying that amnesty won’t be theirs for the taking, but I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it. I believe that they are going to get away with this, the way that they got away with everything else. And that just makes me so angry. So angry!
We’re talking about revenge because it’s a way to channel this feeling, but what power do we have to hold them accountable? We don’t have any power to hold them accountable, and the proof of this is that there has been no solace, no nothing—you go down into the streets and you see volunteers are cleaning the streets while the darak [police] and amn el-’am [general security] are just standing around smoking cigarettes. Blocking roads, redirecting traffic. They’re not doing anything. There has been absolutely no help from the state that did this to us, to clean up the fucking mess. Regular people are pulling bodies out from under the rubble still, with their bare hands. It’s beyond appalling.
EA: It is a question, how this will translate politically in terms of protesters, how people on the streets will react. You mentioned the person who kicked Hariri’s stupid car. We saw Timour Azhari the journalist call out to Nabih Berri, in a journalistic way, like, Many people want you to resign! Obviously, Berri continued walking. But in that video you can see the side-eye of that security guard looking at Timour, like, How do you dare say something like this?
LM: Yeah, One more step out of line and you’re going to be made to pay for this.
EA: Exactly. Timour knows this of course, and he knows that as a journalist he’s only able to get away with so much, and there are limits.
As for the Macron visit to Gemmayzeh, for me the main story isn’t even that Macron was there or that he said things that they’re going to do (we’ll see), or the spectacle and everything around it. For me, it says that guys like Michel Aoun and Nabih Berri and Gebran Bassil—there’s no way they would be able to walk through Gemmayzeh. There’s no chance they would be able to walk through there unharmed.
LM: Of course! They will not be able to walk down there, of course. They will be torn apart, limb from limb. But this is just it. I mean, why did they build all of those walls around parliament? They put concrete blast walls. They set up gates around certain areas in downtown. A couple of weeks ago, I had been paid for a thing and I needed to go withdraw money from one of the three fucking ATMs in the whole city that gives out dollars—which is always empty, by the way. I wanted to walk down Parliament Hill because it’s a straight shot from my house down there. But it was closed and I had to do this huge loop and walk through Riad El-Solh, which has concrete blast walls. They’ve just walled themselves off.
Because that’s the thing: we shout and we cry, and they’re just like somebody putting their hands in their ears and going, I can’t hear you! They just build walls and that’s it. How do you expect these people to be held accountable?
EA: I don’t. A number of people were asking on Twitter how Nabih Berri and Michel Aoun, the two main figureheads right now, can look at this footage and these videos and not feel anything. And I responded, I don’t know if they’re watching these videos. You have no evidence that they’re watching these videos. They definitely felt it; they were close enough. But that doesn’t mean they’re sitting like I’ve been sitting for the past forty-eight hours, just scrolling Twitter and seeing how everyone has been reacting, and the names of the dead at the port, and this worker and that nurse. I genuinely believe it’s more similar to a Trump-like scenario where he has some minders around him, showing him certain things and not showing him everything (minus the Twitter part, obviously, because Nabih Berri and Michel Aoun don’t know how to use Twitter).
But the level of anger that I’ve seen! Honestly, friends of mine that I know are not particularly active in any meaningful way, who participate in protests mainly out of a sense duty—I’ve been hearing things from people that I didn’t think would be possible. Even as I say this, I realize I’ve said this before. I said this in interviews I gave in October and November; so have guests I’ve had since March on the podcast, you and others talking about Lebanon. This is different, this is different, we’ve said it so many times. So I want to pause myself and take a step back and wonder, Is it different?
On the one hand it is inevitably different in the sense that the scale of this is very difficult to compare to anything. It’s being compared to Chernobyl; there are articles making the case for why that is. Some people have compared it to Nagasaki and Hiroshima—I don’t think the comparison is quite as good on that front. Comparisons are always bad in any case, it’s not like there’s a perfect comparison. But what is salient about the Chernobyl comparison is that the levels of Chernobyl’s impact could have been prevented. There are certain things that could have been done to prevent the scale of the loss that followed.
This ammonium nitrate did not have to sit at the port for six years. We’re now seeing more and more investigations popping up, and some journalists doing their job (although the others are not), asking the necessary questions and revealing some documents. And we can see that there’s blame on so many levels that is very difficult to pinpoint and say it’s only this person or that person.
LM: Knowing what we know of this country—they’ve arrested a bunch of people, put them under house arrest, and they lifted banking secrecy on the accounts of a bunch of higher-ups at the port. These are scapegoats! This is what happens with our political class: any time somebody is arrested, it is because they’ve decided that this is a scapegoat. The way I imagine it is like in those mafia movies, where this sniveling piece of shit walks into the boss’s office and they’re like, I’m sorry boss, I didn’t mean it, and it’s like, Well, someone’s got to eat lead for this, and it’s going to be you. That’s how our political system works; it functions like a mafia. On every level it functions like a mafia. On this level as well, it functions like a mafia. If anybody is arrested, if anybody is ever held accountable, if anybody goes to jail, it’s only because the rest of them, to save their asses, have decided, You know what? These guys are disposable. That’s basically it.
EA: For the past seventy-two hours, I’ve been trying to put things together in just one thread. This is how I cope; whether it’s healthy or not, I have no idea. But it seems useful; it’s getting some information to people who otherwise are getting quite a lot of fake news shit. There’s been, unfortunately, a fair amount of this because Beirut and Lebanon went viral for however many hours the internet’s attention span allows.
LM: We got a goddamn icon next to the hashtag!
EA: There’s a heart with the flag.
LM: It makes my skin crawl. I don’t know why it enrages me, but it does.
EA: Same. For me it doesn’t fit the mood whatsoever. I’m using the hashtag when I’m reporting on this building collapse or that, and there’s a stupid heart next to it. It’s very weird.
LM: It’s this hashtag garbage. Even with the #MeToo movement, in a way. What it does is depoliticize everything. It reduces it, it flattens it, it turns it into this thing like, Oh, haram, the people of Beirut are suffering! There are reasons why we are suffering. There are reasons; there are people; there are things that happened. And all of this gets lost underneath the vagaries of sympathy. I’m very grateful to people for their sympathy and their empathy. But at the same time, we need prosecution, we need accountability. Saleem Haddad and Timour also said this on Twitter, both of them: This is a war crime. This needs to be prosecuted, and this needs to be spoken about as a crime against the people. This is not an accident. It is a crime.
People are not allowed to say they don’t have responsibility. I was talking to a dear friend of mine this morning in Oregon—I woke up at five and I was like, I can’t do it, I need to talk to someone and I know he keeps odd hours. So we spoke, and we both cried on the phone at various different times. I wrote about his dad being buried under the rubble—he could have lost his father. Anyway. So yeah, he’s a lawyer and he does international law. He explained that you cannot say, I’m not responsible because I was ignorant. That’s not a legal defense in any way. It’s not a defensible position in any way. You still legally are held accountable. There are mechanisms in place that give this a kind of language, that place this crime in a kind of context.
I feel like this is really important. I don’t want this to be depoliticized, not on the local level or on the international level. Because frankly, we do need some kind of international help to be able to hold them accountable. Not that I believe in these kinds of charades either. Even symbolically—how do you take them to court? They need to be dragged to court and made to answer for this. And not just those scapegoats. Don Corleone needs to go to jail.
Can I tell you something? I need to wrap up because I feel like I’m on the verge of a panic attack. I underslept. My finger tips are going numb. Maybe I need to put on some YouTube videos and watch people make soap, and try to relax.
EA: Yeah, let’s just wrap it up, that’s fine. Lina, thanks a lot for your time with this. I know this is very difficult and you have other things to do. Thank you for sharing this time with me. I will try and add some additional comments or reflections of my own and put them all in one episode later today.
LM: Thanks Elia. I’m happy to do this. I’ve gotten a lot of media requests, and I understand that journalists want to speak to people, especially if someone has written about this. But I’m just not in a position to speak to this. I don’t consider myself a journalist. I feel what I felt during the thawra as well: obviously, I write in English, so I’m writing to a foreign audience, but I’m always writing with fellow Lebanese people or fellow Arabs in mind as my primary audience, and I think of the foreign readers as people who get to eavesdrop on that.
I always think, How would we phrase these things to each other? I feel this more strongly now than I’ve ever felt it before, and I also feel like there are certain things that I only want to say [among us]. So when you asked, Can we have a conversation about this? I didn’t really hesitate. If there’s someone I want to talk to, it’s someone who understands exactly all of these feelings and all of this anger and all of this sadness.
EA: Same here. I wanted to talk to someone else who knows this, and also someone who’s in Lebanon right now. Thank you a lot for your time.
LM: Thank you, Elia. Have a good day. What a ridiculous thing to say! Sorry, that was me on automatic pilot. Have a forgetful day? What can I tell you?
EA: Just go watch soaps now, it’s fine.
LM: I highly recommend to anybody listening, these soap-making videos are incredibly soothing.
EA: I have a number of cooking channels I watch as well from time to time.
LM: I love cooking channels as well, but I watched so many of them during quarantine and ate so much as a result! Anyway. Take care!
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